In these important respects, I admit that little can be deduced from my example. All that I can pretend to teach is that any man possessed of a small but secure income can live with ease and comfort in the country, where he would be condemned to a bitter struggle in a city; that a country life presents incomparable advantages of health and happiness; that it is not dull or monotonous to the man who has a genuine love of Nature, and some intellectual resources in himself; and that what are called the privations of such a life are inconsiderable compared with the real injuries endured by the man of small income, who earns his difficult bread in the fierce struggle of a city or a manufacturing town. This leads me to a final question, viz. can nothing be done to regenerate our cities? Is it quite impossible that the City of the Future should be so contrived as to offer the best advantages of corporate and communal existence without those intolerable disadvantages which at present make the city a realm of 'dreadful night' to the poor, the weak, and the sensitive? I began by saying that I am not a hater of cities. I feel their fascination, and four years of country life have not destroyed that fascination. When I had occasion recently to return to London for a week's visit, I was surprised to find with what eager joy I plunged into the labyrinth of lighted streets, how the blood began to quicken with the movement of the ceaseless crowd, how much of grandeur and beauty assailed the eye in the wide perspective of domes and towers and spires, how the very voice of London, sonorous and confused, like the noise of a great battlefield, thrilled the spirit, and I felt again that old and poignant charm of cities, that quickening of the imagination which lies in mere multitude, that perpetual seduction of the senses begotten by the revelation of so much effort and magnificence. There was an indescribable vivacity in this moving crowd, a contagious animation in the air; and, if truth be told, I found the air fresher and the sky less grey than I had fancied, for a south-west wind, soft as velvet and wet with sea-salt, blew through street and square, and the sky was full of sunshine and of racing clouds. I could not wonder at the love of cities; it seemed a passion inherent in modern man, fed and brought to its maturity by centuries of communal existence. And so the thought grew, that the temper of enduring antagonism to cities was a temper more and more impossible to modern man, who has long since left behind the realities of elemental life, the rude simplicities of patriarchal modes of existence. The City is with us, and it has come to stay. London grows vaster year by year, and there is no sign of arrest in its prodigious life. Is it then a dream quite impossible and vain, that cities may be so administered as to develop the best life of men, and not to stint it?